To be fair, some of the more thoughtful figures on the right wing of North American and European politics have been advocating a major re-focusing of attention on nuclear power for some years now.
The pitch has always been simple enough – nuclear is clean, relative to coal, oil and natural gas, and you can produce it at a competitive price.
Or to put it another way, if you want to accommodate the climate change lobby without breaking the bank on renewables subsidies, nuclear is the way to go.
But there have been two problems with this approach: safety concerns and inertia.
Now, though, the inertia has gone.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put paid to that. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and governments in Europe and North America, where Russian oil is banned, are begging to look elsewhere for alternatives.
In recent days, the Belgians have put back plans to phase out nuclear power by ten years, the Germans and the Japanese are said to be revisiting old attitudes to nuclear, and in the UK Boris Johnson is holding some kind of a summit with bigwigs in the nuclear power generating industry.
If the Ukraine crisis resolves next week, this may all come to nothing.
But if it drags on, as wars have a tendency to do, then uranium is going to become an even hotter commodity than it already is.
Already the uranium price has gone through the roof, along with most other commodities, in response to the disruptions to supply chains.
At the current spot price of US$55 per pound, it’s already trading in a higher range than it has done for more than ten years.
But that’s just in anticipation of further disruption to come.
First off, if governments in the Western world start building more nuclear plants they’re going to need to get the uranium from somewhere. And, following on from the Fukushima disaster, uranium hasn’t exactly been a popular substance to go looking for.
The mining industry, which has seen good returns in recent years on commodities focussed on a more long-term green future, like lithium, copper and cobalt, has to a degree dropped the ball on uranium.
The price has been low, interest in mining it has been muted, and the real action has been elsewhere.
Nevertheless, there is a silver lining to this cloudy outlook. In places like the famous Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan, huge uranium deposits are already known to exist. The question of their exploitation has largely been down to economics, and if those haven’t been favorable over the past decade or so, expect a sudden bursting from exploration and development in the area.
Indeed to some extent it’s already happening. Some of the most notable of the Western uranium miners are all already active in the Athabasca, in particular Cameco, which has continued to operate mines at Cigar Lake, MacArthur Lake and Key Lake, but which also has major projects like Rabbit Lake on care and maintenance.
How easy would it be to switch Rabbit Lake back on?
The answer, of course, is not that easy. But Cameco has been spending roughly C$30mln per year keeping the project in good order lately, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility either.
Cameco’s share price is now as high as it’s been in ten years, partly because the market knows that it has the ability to turn on the taps like no other company.
And it’s no surprise that the world’s attention has been on Cameco in this regard. The Athabasca, where it holds a central position, was the key to making Canada the world’s number one uranium producing country before it was overtaken by Kazakhstan in the past couple of years.
But supply from Kazakhstan is very much an open question, given that Vladimir Putin played a key role last year in propping up the ruling regime there when it got into a few difficulties. Could it be that Kazakh supplies go off the international market soon, and get routed only through China and Russia?
That’s not out of the question, which means the world’s other major sources of supply – the Athabasca, various regions of Central and South West Africa, and Australia – will become the focus of increasing attention and investment capital.
Small companies like Power Metals will benefit from this tendency too, as they will be more nimble in getting exploration programs approved and underway, while mid-tier companies like Goviex and Deep Yellow Limited - already well advanced with economic studies - will also get a lift. And companies that had to a degree withdrawn from the space, like Manhattan Corporation, will be able to dust off old projects and get back to what they do best.
But for those who just want the straight gains that uranium is likely to book, there’s always the swath of new uranium ETFs, which weren’t available last time the price went this high, but sure are doing well this time round.